Marathon’s Fred Thiel Says It’s Time for the U.S. to Treat Bitcoin as a Strategic Asset

Marathon CEO Fred Thiel Calls for Immediate Bitcoin Mining to Fund U.S. Strategic Reserve

“A strategic reserve without actual bitcoin is just empty rhetoric,” Thiel stated.

LAS VEGAS — At the Bitcoin 2025 conference, Marathon Digital Holdings CEO Fred Thiel urged the U.S. government to move beyond policy announcements and begin actively mining bitcoin to build its strategic reserve.

Thiel highlighted that while President Trump’s March executive order authorized the creation of a strategic bitcoin reserve, the government has yet to outline how it plans to fill it. He proposed using excess hydroelectric energy to mine bitcoin domestically, aligning with the administration’s “budget-neutral” acquisition approach.

“It’s essential to turn promises into action by starting to accumulate bitcoin,” Thiel said during a panel discussion.

Currently, the reserve consists primarily of approximately 200,000 bitcoins seized in civil and criminal cases. However, industry leaders and politicians, including Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming), believe the government should expand its holdings beyond confiscated assets.

Senator Lummis recently reintroduced the BITCOIN Act of 2025, which calls for converting a portion of the government’s underutilized assets, such as gold certificates, into bitcoin over the next several years.

“We have ample resources to acquire a significant share of bitcoin without additional spending,” Lummis remarked.

Nonetheless, she acknowledged that significant legislative progress may be delayed due to ongoing discussions around stablecoin regulation and market structure reform, as well as a general lack of understanding about bitcoin among many lawmakers.

“Advancing this agenda requires overcoming educational barriers,” Lummis said.

With mounting pressure from the crypto community, the focus now turns to when the U.S. government will begin taking concrete steps to operationalize its strategic bitcoin reserve.